Exploring Empowerment as a Basis for Quantifying Sustainability

Empowerment quantifies the choice available to an agent as the actuation channel capacity. However, not all such choices are sustainable: After some choices, the agent may not be able to return to its original state, or returning there may be costly. In this paper we explore whether empowerment can be adapted to obtain a measure of sustainability. As a straightforward modification, the agent's options is restricted to actions that are reversible within a given time horizon. We furthermore investigate the lengths of return paths and discuss their potential to indicate sustainability.